


Escape Artist

by surestsmile



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-17
Updated: 2013-03-17
Packaged: 2017-12-05 14:23:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/724298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/surestsmile/pseuds/surestsmile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is how a memory witch forgets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Escape Artist

DiZ does not make her do this. If anything, DiZ does not bother her beyond caring for Sora and his returning memories, he leaves her alone well enough. Riku (not her Riku, Sora's Riku, Kairi's Riku) usually sits in Sora's chamber and broods, thin elfin face hooded and large green eyes blinded by a single strip of black, and does not speak to her much, even when she sits beside him. King Mickey, on the other hand, had been nice and chipper when she first met him, but he hasn't paid them a visit in a long time.

There is almost nothing for her to do to while away her days at the Haunted Mansion, aside from linking together Sora's memories. She knits them when she's fresh (well, as fresh as she could be) from sleep, sitting in her chair and carefully picking through the pieces like a puzzle. 

Her magic, if that's what she has, drains out quicker than she's used to during this process, and she has to really concentrate in an effort to control.

Every session leaves her empty, her shoulders and her back aching in quiet protest, and she feels so cold almost to the point of freezing. It is then she returns to herself, shelving what's done of her work and stacking them neatly. She stands up, oh so slow, so that her muscles don't cramp after staying in the same position for hours, and shuffles off in search of something to eat.

Sometimes, DiZ watches her while she works. The first time she notices it she squeaks and stumbles, and for an instant she thinks she feels a gloved hand at her arm, trying to steady her before she falls through and lands awkwardly on her chair.

DiZ, however, never, ever moves from his place. 

\--------------------------------

Naminé understands a little about the mechanics of memory manipulation. Every memory has a place, she cannot simply erase them willy-nilly like how she creates. If she wants to preserve the heart that held them, she needs to take things slow, precise, unchain each link one by one and put them together again in a different way, but always so slow, so slow that her victim never notices that their memory has already betrayed them.

But because she has no heart to preserve, no heart to break, her plans for herself are less polished, more crude, and she thinks it's exactly what she deserves.

\--------------------------------

In the beginning she wanders around the forest that surrounds the abandoned mansion, having received explicit instructions from DiZ not to enter the town places or be seen by the townspeople. She's never asked why, having been taught never to question anything.

But the forest is chilly, hidden away from the gaze of the ever-dying sun, and Naminé thinks that it is as cold as Marluxia's greenhouses, and far less colourful besides. She tells herself that she doesn't miss his flowers, and shivers when the wind sighs, brushing over her forehead and gently playing with her hair, lifting the pale strands away to kiss the back of her neck.

On a daring whim one day, she walks to the edge of the town, peering through the crumbling walkway, just to see what Roxas' birthplace is like. The sun seems brighter there, bathing the walls in a warm yellow glow, so different from the cold white artificial light that she is used to. 

But she doesn't step through that door. Not because of DiZ's orders, or because she is afraid, but because it feels wrong, somehow, to walk out into those streets and play a little game of "Let's Pretend" with the residents there. Because she knows she cannot very well tell them that she's not like them, that she's not human, that she's just a shell wandering around places she will never belong to. If there's one thing she's learned from Sora's memories, it's that strangers are curious creatures to townspeople, and questions are always asked, and she doesn't think she can lie to them. 

She's not an accomplished liar like Axel, who makes deceit such an art that he manages to fool even himself, and besides, she's sick of the untruths she had spun in her days at Castle Oblivion. She doesn't want to relieve those days any more if she can, or re-live them. This she promises herself, despite the fact that her room in the mansion is an almost exact fascimile of the one she had in the Castle, or that Sora's flower-bubble design had not entirely been of her own choosing. There are just some things she can't let go of, not yet anyway.

But it tugs at her then, the desire to just mix in with the townspeople, to somehow pass off as a visitor from another town (there had to be another town, right?) and just... _pretend_ that she's normal. The sunlight's warm there, after all, and it beckons to her, desire wrapped in warmth and light and yellowed stone, and she wants it, so much-

_"Desires are dangerous, Naminé."_

She flinches at the ghost of a voice, hands gripping the front of her dress. 

"Yes, they are," she whispers in agreement to nobody, and she turns away, slipping back into the cold.

So now she sits in the courtyard instead whenever she wants out of the mansion, out of her room. The heavy oak door hides from her the indistinct hum of DiZ's machines, and she's far enough from the stone walkway not to be tempted by the town.

Under the sky, she tries not to think of how the dark twilight blue is so much like the colour of Marluxia's eyes.

\--------------------------------

_"You must not be seen, you must not be heard."_

\--------------------------------

Rumours quickly spread that the haunted mansion has a new ghost, a girl child with pale blond hair and a sickly look who wears nothing but white and pale blue, and while DiZ does not punish her for disobeying him, his mocking laughter is punishment enough.

\--------------------------------

She looks at Riku and sometimes, it breaks her non-existent heart, because she remembers another boy just like him, with the green eyes and the white hair and the dreamy, hopeful smile. Oh, she wonders those times about where he is now, and whether he is happy without her in his new life. Sometimes she wonders if he is dead.

She's never asked Riku if he had ever met his twin in the Castle. She doubts she'll ever ask him about it.

\---------------------------------

Riku's not a morning person, she thinks, while her hands clumsily spread butter over crumbling toast and dusts it lightly with sugar. He's sort of grumbly when he wakes up, hair tied back tight and messy to keep it out of his face, and he slouches over the coffee maker as it burbles its way through the grounded beans.

It's not the caffeine that wakes him up, he says as he pours two cups, _it's the taste, sour and bitter and black as pitch, just the way DiZ likes it_.

He never offers the coffee to her.

She, for her part, never takes any for herself.

\--------------------------------

"I don't dislike you," Riku says matter-of-factly. "But I can't like you for who you are either. Or what you've done to Sora."

"Oh." Naminé replies, and although his words hurt she knows that Riku will not apologise for them. Her faltering words are for herself. "Alright. Okay."

\--------------------------------

She doesn't dream when she sleeps. Instead, she recalls memories upon wakening, and somehow, her memories seem more real than her current existence.

"Stop haunting me!" she cries to the air. "You are all dead. _Dead!_ Why can't you just stay dead!"

Larxene's laughter in her head is just another construct, unreal and hollow. She tells herself that it can't hurt her, it's just in her head and if she doesn't allow it _it can't hurt her_.

\--------------------------------

Naminé fears that she might really go mad.

\--------------------------------

DiZ does not make her do this. He does not force her hands to grip her pencils and her crayons and her markers, make her draw the pictures of the Organization members who had taunted her, flaunted her freedom in front of her face and who now haunts her, turning her own memories against herself. He does not make her reach into the emptiness that is her being, pull at her memories and slowly, surely draw them out of her head, press them onto paper.

DiZ has his own bitter plans to execute, and he has no time to entertain a Nobody in vanquishing her own demons. 

Drawing Lexaeus' and Zexion's memory is easy. She gives earthy colours to Number Five, remembering the stability and strength that she had unconsciously associated with him, and she grounds Number Six in shades of deep purple, blue and black, lines blurred and indistinct and vaguely sinister in comparision to his huge partner. They are on the same page, the same piece of paper, and somehow she feels it's right that way.

Their colleague Vexen is blue, light blue emulating the colour of ice and spliced with the dead green of his eyes and the dry, wheatish brown of his hair.

She takes more time with Larxene, even though the woman comes easily to her. Recalling the memories of Number Twelve hurt, like picking her way through a field of naked live wires. Eventually, though, she pins Larxene down like a butterfly, hammering the woman's figure on paper in smears of jagged yellow and parameters of black. Larxene's voice shrieks like nails on glass, hard and metallic in her head, and Namine squeezes her eyes shut tight in response.

"Go," she breathes. " _Go_."

But she feels no power in saying those words.

She hesitates over red and black, fingering the red crayon before putting it back into its place in the box. The Axel in her memory says nothing to that, for which she is oddly grateful. It means that she doesn't need to justify her choice, not to him, not to herself.

Her fingers tremble when they pick up dark brown and black and navy blue and pink. He is a ghost at her shoulder, but for once he is silent in her mind, quietly looking at her sketch of him. To her surprise, his memory goes with relative, terrible ease, no screaming, no cries, no denial.

Like she hadn't meant anything to him, not at all, especially if he's going to disappear just like that-

_"I'm tired, Naminé."_

"Oh."

She finds her vision blurring when she looks at his picture, but no tears fall.

And finally, finally, she picks up white, and dark blue, and green, the colours of the boy who loved her with all of his false heart and more, and she draws him out so quickly, dashing his figure off in crayon scribbles on white paper, so quickly that his memory has no time to look or smile or breathe her name, one last time.

This is the only time she says, properly, "I'm sorry."

When she is done, she gathers the overflowing pieces in her arms, the pictures and the voices and the ghosts that went with them, and slowly, one by one, feeds them to the fire roaring merrily in the fireplace.

Her eyes are dry as her memories burn to nothing but ashes.

And every day after that, she wakes up in the morning, and briefly wonders which memory she has forgotten.


End file.
